Phonak Dynamic Soundfield Technology Turns The Classroom Into A Giant Hearing Aid

Soundfield classroom amplification systems have improved the education and lives of thousands of schoolchildren who otherwise would miss valuable instruction simply because they cannot hear their teachers well enough to understand what they are teaching. Now Phonak has put its vast experience designing hearing aids to use with a next-generation soundfield system featuring a 12-speaker array that reduces echoing and reverberation and automatically adjusts frequency and volume levels to achieve optimum signal-to-noise ratios in changing listening environments.  The new Phonak Dynamic Soundfield system essentially turns the entire classroom into a giant hearing aid that can dramatically improve comprehension and learning.

Classroom amplification systems have been around a long time, as have FM-based systems transmitting the teacher’s voice into headsets or hearing aids worn by individual hard-of-hearing students. But the experience of users varies tremendously depending on the placement and quality of speakers, the quality of the microphones and amplifiers, and the acoustics of the classroom itself. The drawbacks of earlier systems were so pronounced that the Acoustical Society of America found that “improperly maintained microphones and loudspeakers or poor user skills can cause even poorer speech communication than no amplification system.” In other words, amplifying unintelligible noise only makes voices that much more unintelligible.

But long-term studies have indicated that amplification and other forms of assistance in the classroom can dramatically improve learning The Mainstream Amplification Resource Room Study (MARRS), which found that “significant educational instruction effects can be achieved by sound field amplification” and that “these gains can be cost effectively realized within the regular classroom without the need for stigmatizing labeling and segregation as well as expensive and scheduling complications of special class placement.”

Phonak’s Dynamic Soundfield system addresses the reverberation and echoing that makes comprehension more difficult with amplification by its array of directional speakers that automatically adjust frequency and volume settings to the acoustics of the room to reduce rather than increase reverberation. Years of research into how directional microphones in hearing aids can achieve a higher signal-to-noise ratio to make voices easier to understand in difficult listening environments have been applied to the acoustical problems amplifying a teacher’s voice in a noisy classroom.

The new Phonak Soundfield system is also the first to operate simultaneously in multiple modes, permitting the teacher to broadcast directly through a Phonak inspiro FM transmitter to individual students wearing headsets or hearing aids while broadcasting to the rest of the class over the amplified system. The new system also is “future proof,” providing flexible integration with standard computer and audio systems, and eliminates interference issues through automatic frequency hopping, allowing the Dynamic Soundfield to co-exist alongside a school’s WiFi and Bluetooth networks.

Two Cheers For On Semiconductor’s Acquisition Of Hearing-Aid Chip Maker Sound Design Technologies

On Semiconductor’s recent acquisition of Sound Design Technologies reduces the number of independent manufacturers of digital signal processor (DSP) chips for hearing aids, lessening competition in an industry that is already highly concentrated. Less competition is not a good thing over the long run, because when fewer manufacturers control a market, they can charge higher prices for the products they’ve already built. They can also invest less in new technology innovations because there are fewer competitors out there likely to leapfrog them. However, over the short term, On Semiconductor’s acquisition acquisition of Sound Design may actually be a very good thing for the hearing industry. Here’s why.

Ever since Sound Design spun out of Canadian semiconductor maker Gennum several years ago, it has been the only independent DSP chip manufacturer focused on the hearing aid market. Many hearing-aid manufacturers who do not design and build their own chips use Sound Design’s chips to power their hearing aids. DSPs are specialized semiconductor products whose hearing-aid manufacturer customers expect lower costs and higher performance every year along with more miniaturization and special features. DSPs allow hearing-aid makers to provide better feedback canceling capability, automatic adjustment to different listening environments, automatic adjustment of directional microphones, wireless communication between left and right hearing aids to provide better hearing “in stereo,” Bluetooth integration, and numerous other features that have dramatically improved digital hearing aids in recent years.

Sound Design’s new Wolverine DSP is a high-performance digital engine for hearing aids that is smaller than earlier DSPs, consumes less power, delivers more processing capability and enables easier and more flexible development and deployment of custom sound-processing algorithms and special applications by hearing-aid manufacturers. Clearly the company’s focus on the hearing-aid market has paid off.

But chip design, manufacturing and distribution is a highly capital-intensive business, and Sound Design on its own was nowhere near as large as many of the semiconductor companies it would have to compete against. Without being able to achieve economies of scale from a manufacturing operation selling a lot of products, it’s hard for a chip company to keep costs as low as customers want.

Therefore being acquired should enable Sound Design to leverage On Semiconductor’s mass-production capabilities to keep costs down. It will also be able to tap On Semiconductor’s deep bench of designers with extensive experience developing power and signal management semiconductors, logic chips, discrete components and custom devices — all of which can be applied to next-generation hearing-aid DSPs. That’s a benefit to hearing-aid manufacturers, who need to continue integrating all kinds of new capabilities into ever-smaller form factors. On Semiconductor spun out of Motorola several years ago and is now a leading publicly held semiconductor company with nearly $2 billion (USD) in annual revenue, so it’s got all the resources a small manufacturer of hearing-aid DSPs should need. If it allows Sound Design’s team of executives to continue focusing as relentlessly on the hearing-aid market as they have in the past, the acquisition could be a win-win-win for On Semiconductor, Sound Design, hearing-aid manufacturers who depend on them, and hearing-aid users who will continue to benefit from new technologies and better performance at lower costs.

However, that’s a big “if.” Read more

VitaSound Neuro-Compensator Applies Brain Science To A Unique And Potentially Revolutionary New Sound Processing System For Hearing Aids

VitaSound Audio, Inc., a young hearing-aid company in Canada, has come up with an entirely new approach to sound-processing software for hearing aids that could fundamentally change the way we think about compensating for damaged hearing. I got a demo of VitaSound’s Neuro-Compensator technology several months ago and have been struggling ever since to come up with appropriate words to describe it. “Unique,” “new,” “unprecedented” and “potentially revolutionary” are the best I can do for starters.

The Neuro-Compensator sound processing system is based on nearly two decades of research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, into how the human brain comprehends the signals processed by the auditory system, from the middle ear through the auditory nerve. The researchers mapped the signals produced by hundreds of auditory inputs processed by people with healthy hearing, coming up with a hugely complex model of “normal” hearing response to sounds ranging from human speech to music to pure tones to rush-hour traffic to cocktail-party noise. Then they developed the Neuro-Compensator software to compare the norm to that of a person with damaged hearing, and to produce a hearing-aid amplification program that not only amplifies the frequencies where hearing has been lost, but also filters out sounds that a healthy auditory processing system would normally suppress. The benefit is better comprehension because the system constantly adjusts amplification at multiple frequencies in response to different sounds to match the auditory profile of a normal, healthy auditory system responding to various listening environments. Read more

Can Hearing Aids Make You Smarter? Research On Cognitive Hearing and Listening Fatigue Says They Can — Is The Industry Finally Listening?

Hearing aid manufacturers have finally started listening to ten years of academic research into concepts known as “cognitive hearing,” “listening fatigue” and “cognitive fatigue.” It took them long enough, but I’m not complaining, because at least they are finally claiming to attack the problem of hearing loss at its roots.

In recent announcements of their next-generation hearing aids, industry leaders Starkey Laboratories and Oticon both claimed their new products would ameliorate “cognitive fatigue” and therefore improve not only hearing but also the ability to listen and understand. Since the invention of the hearing aid, the industry has focused mostly on simple amplification that makes noise louder and therefore easier to hear. Too often, hearing aids amplify the noises uses don’t want to hear and actually make it more difficult to comprehend the sounds — speech — they do want to hear. Now the industry is finally trying to address the critical issue of better cognition.

While neither Starkey nor Oticon went so far as to say their hearing aids would make you smarter, that’s really the value proposition the industry should start trying to deliver. No, hearing aids can’t make you smarter all by themselves. But hearing well can enable you to listen well, and listening well can enable you to better understand what you hear, better understanding makes it easier for you to communicate in real time with other people, and intelligent communication lets your brain be as smart as it naturally wants to be. Now think of the same scenario in reverse: no hearing assistance means less listening means less understanding means less intelligent communication. In other words, failure to get a good pair of hearing aids can make you appear to be a whole lot stupider than you really are.

The catch is what constitutes a “good pair of hearing aids.” Dr. Brent Edwards at the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California has been looking at the issue of “cognitive hearing” for years, and his work is finally working its way into the products Starkey is delivering to the marketplace. Read more

Geek Alert: How Knowles Electronics Makes Hearing-Aid Microphones Smaller and Smarter

I’ve always been amazed by the directional microphones in my hearing aids. They are super-sensitive, they can be adjusted to catch noise either 360 degrees or just from the person speaking to me, and they are smaller than your fingernail. The technology that has to go into such finely tuned instruments is amazing, and I recently came across a good video of Daniel Warren, director of research for Knowles Electronics, that gives a flavor of the rocket science behind them. (It’s a promotional video for Wolfram Research, known for the Mathematica software tools used by engineers and, more recently, for the revolutionary computational search engine, Wolfram Alpha, developed over the past decade by computer science genius Steve Wolfram). The video is also a good example of the pains engineers have to go through to explain in layman’s terms how their inventions work and why they are so important. My rule of thumb is, even if I can’t understand half of what they say, if the product works, I will use it.

Gennum Abandons Hearing-Aid Market With DSP Chip and Headset Spinoffs

Gennum Corp. of Canada, long one of the leading suppliers of digital signal processing (DSP) chips and other technologies to the hearing-aid and headset industries, is abandoning the hearing-aid market with the spinout of its hearing instrument design and manufacturing operations to a private equity group and the sale of its consumer Bluetooth headset business to a consumer electronics company based in Sweden. Read more

Agilent Makes It Easy To Design Hearing-Aid Compatible Cell Phones

Now there’s no excuse. Agilent Technologies has come up with a design system enabling manufacturers of mobile phones to easily ensure their handsets meet all the hearing-aid-compatibility (HAC) standards mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Read more

Future Cochlear Implant Patients Might Preserve Some Residual Hearing

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new, less-invasive means of implanting electrodes into the cochlea that may ultimately do less damage to hearing nerves in the cochlea and preserve more residual hearing in the patient. Read more

Digital Clarity Power From Clarity Products Is Chock-Full Of Digital Signal Processing Performance

Several weeks ago I complained that Clarity Products hadn’t adequately explained the enhanced Digital Clarity Power (DCP) technology it was promoting as the latest and greatest innovation for its cordless and amplified telephones. Clarity was quick to answer my questions with comments on the blog post. And now on their website they’ve unveiled the technical background information they promised. Read more

California Dreaming About Hearing-Hair Replacement

Let’s talk hair-replacement therapy. No, I’m not talking about premature baldness, Rogaine or Hair Club for Men. I’m talking about the 15,000 hair-like cells we have in each cochlea at birth that are responsible for translating sound waves from the ear drum into electrical signals the brain can decode as speech, music, a baby crying and all other sounds. When these cells die due to natural aging processes, trauma, or exposure to too much noise or otoxic drugs, we experience sensorineurial hearing loss, the most common form of hearing impairment. Read more

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